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Article Excerpt
JAY D. ARONSON, GENETIC WITNESS: SCIENCE, LAW, AND CONTROVERSY IN THE MAKING OF DNA PROFILING (Rutgers University Press 2007). 270 PP.
In [1910 in] London, Scotland Yard and the forensic scientists of the Home Office continued to puzzle over what had killed the victim found in the cellar at No. 39 Hilldrop Crescent....
At St. Mary's Hospital in London, William Henry Willcox, a famed forensic chemist and senior scientific analyst for the Home Office, took delivery of the five jars of remains held in the Islington Mortuary.... He was an expert on poisons and testified so often that reporters gave him a nickname, The King s Poisoner. (1)
The history of forensic science is intertwined with public relations, not only in the sense that all of the sciences earn trust in the "court of public opinion," but because juries must be convinced that a forensic expert's techniques are worthy of confidence. Getting forensic science off the ground was apparently not easy, as the "legal and medical journals of the first half of the [twentieth] century are filled with lamentations of juries' refusal to acknowledge scientific circumstantial evidence. Murder juries often refused to convict in the absence of eyewitness testimony...." (2) A public relations campaign, however, "carried out through magazine articles, World's Fair exhibits, short stories, books, and Hollywood movies" delivered the message that "disinterested, 'objective' science was the best weapon against crime." (3) The FBI's Scientific Crime Detection Lab was opened in 1932 as a model for similar municipal laboratories; an exhibit at Chicago's 1933 Century of Progress Fair explained that a medical examiner is "a non-political official, [an] expert in medicolegal pathology, who conducts a scientific investigation into the cause of death, whose work is purely medical [and] whose impartial findings are accepted by court and jury in criminal cases...." (4)
Even as some of the old forensic techniques--for example, phrenology, hypnosis, and truth serum--lost their luster, the field of forensic science has increasingly shared in "science's cultural authority as pure, unbiased, and objective," and the testimony of a forensic expert has been generally viewed as "unaffected by his or her own background, beliefs, and social and intellectual biases." (5) Lurking in the background of this effort to "transubstantiate opinion into fact," however, is our sense that forensic experts "ignore or deny that [their] truth was inevitably filtered and shaped by professional experience, interests, and personal biases." (6)
Nowadays, forensic science appears to be in crisis, (7) and its foundation is cracking, or, in the words of Professors Michael Risinger and Michael Saks, virtually non-existent:
Many of the forensic techniques used in courtroom proceedings, such as hair analysis, fingerprinting, the polygraph, and ballistics, rest on a foundation of very weak science, and virtually no rigorous research to strengthen this foundation is being done. Instead, we have a growing body of unreliable research funded by law enforcement agencies with a strong interest in promoting the validity of these techniques. This forensic science differs significantly from what most of us consider science to be. (8)
Notably absent from the list of flawed forensic techniques, however, is the field of DNA profiling. DNA test results, "as the gold standard of forensic evidence," have eclipsed
other forms of eyewitness testimony, confessions, or older forms of forensic evidence [which are now commonly assumed to be] ... erroneous or misleading. All other forms of criminal evidence are now invidiously compared to "DNA" with its strong connections with laboratory science and the impressive probability figures that accompany reports of matching DNA profiles. (9)
Nevertheless, even as we now equate DNA with "science" and "truth," we should not forget that "[j]udicial and popular notions of science are flexible and historically changeable," or that "until recently, latent print comparison (fingerprinting) was deemed to be an absolutely certain, unassailable, and error-free source of scientific evidence." (10)
Responding to such warnings, Jay D. Aronson's Genetic Witness: Science, Law, and Controversy in the Making of DNA Profiling offers an historical perspective on the recent search for a "forensic silver bullet--a foolproof technique that can identify absolutely the perpetrator of violent acts from the physical traces left at the crime scene and provide a tool for tracking ... criminals." (11) Aronson, an assistant professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University, explores the twenty-year process by which DNA profiling became known as "the best method of forensic identification ever created"--a...
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